You may have some questions about what exactly a Virtual Private Server is, and how it can benefit your business whilst reducing costs at the same time. Here is a tutorial which introduces you to Ausweb’s Virtuozzo VPS Hosting solution.
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Strand says handset is operators’ worst friend : By Tony Dennis
TELECOMS ANALYST Strand Consult has described Apple’s Ithingey as the Paris Hilton of mobile phones. A seemingly beautiful product but actually no good to the operators partnered with Apple.
The most damning part of the company’s report says that, “Our research shows that there is not one single Apple partner in the world [among the mobile operators] that has increased its overall turnover, profit and market share thanks to the Iphone.”
Worse still, Strand claims that a number of operators have issued profit warnings related to their Iphone ventures. The central theme from Strand is that the Ithingey burns up valuable mobile broadband.
Most Ithingey users choose not to view the websites in XHTML which is optimised for low bandwidth and mobile phone-sized screens.
Read the whole article at TheInquirer
Music & Entertainment, News, Off Topic, Rambles
One of the great things about the concept of cloud computing is the possiblities it creates for large, disruptive markets. We talk about compute capacity markets and the like all the time–that’s the commoditization of IT infrastructure. But, as Simon Wardley would be quick to point out, the commoditization of one technology almost always leads to the opportunity to innovate others. What are the new technologies that cloud infrastructure will enable?
An interesting discussion broke out in the “cloud-o-sphere” this week surrounding a related comment from our own Doug Gourlay at Cisco’s CScape analyst conference last week. In talking about the effects of cross-cloud workload mobility to Andreas Antonopoulos of Nemertes Research Group, Doug mentioned the concept of “Virtual-Routing” (a horrible term), the idea that one can move the compute loads to the best network location rather than rerouting the network to the workload.
Science & Tech
Cloud Computing, Virtual Routing
Pipe Networks has announced that its plan to lay a new undersea fibre-optic cable between Australia and Guam will proceed, despite some initial hurdles faced during preliminary financial talks. The current tight financial market status had put a cloud over the project, but the overall support for the project from the various parties concerned saw an agreement reached and the required boxes ticked to begin the development process.
The new cable will be a huge benefit to Australian businesses and consumers, who currently face relatively limited access to the international internet backbone compared to many other countries. Naturally we here at AUSWEB are very pleased to hear the news and hope to see further network improvement announcements in the coming months.
Science & Tech
Desktop virtualization has evolved in 2008 as a promising technology, with major vendors announcing or updating their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions. IDC predicts that desktop virtualization will grow to $2 billion annually by 2011, while Gartner forecasts that up to 660 million PCs will be virtualized in that same timeframe.
Read more…
Web Hosting News
Cisco, End Users, Virtualization
Internet users around the world have been put at risk by a very serious exploit found in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The exploit has put over 500 million internet users around the world at risk, as well as the websites they visit.
Microsoft have announced that users should use an alternate browser until they release an emergency patch to correct the issue which affects all versions of Internet Explorer. Microsoft Australia said that it was “working around the clock” to correct the fault in the browser used by 70 per cent of internet users.
Believed to have been created in China, the virus is used to steal information from victims infected computers. These details include game passwords, bank account details & logins as well as any other person information which can be used or sold in the cyber underworld.
All Internet Explorer users should make sure they have their automatic updates on, if not they can check the Microsoft website for updates here:
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/updates/bulletins/200812_oob.mspx
Otherwise we would recommend everyone to get Firefox, the worlds leading and (in my opinion) the most secure browser.

Microsoft have released a patch to fix the exploit. Internet explorer users are recommended to head to: http://www.microsoft.com.au/security to download the latest Internet Explorer.
News
Exploit, Internet Explorer, Malware, Microsoft, Virus
Google is planning to expand their worldwide infrastructure even further after announcing that they have just purchased an additional 60 acres of land for $3.13M in Lenoir, North Carolina. Lenoir has previously already been selected as a location for the search engine’s servers when Google announced in January 2007 they have purchased a large area of land in the county for the construction of a $600M data center. The Lenoir facility was opened in May this year.
Google’s operations manager for the existing Lenoir facility, Tom Jacobik has previously stated that the location chosen was a strategic decision made by the company. Google have been promised by local and state leaders that they would receive more than $100M in takes breaks over 30 years for building in the county. Compare this to Microsoft’s $20.7M tax abatement deal for the construction of their San Antonio center, Clearly google are eating a bigger slice of cake.
Read more…
News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Data center, expansion, Google, Lenior
Ausweb has long strived itself on educating the young from an early age. We have spent hours apon hours producing tutorials and educational spiels for all to see as you can see in our tutorials section. Well today we add another grasshopper to the Ausweb ranks.
If you have lodged a ticket in our online support system, there is a good chance you have had at least one reply from our keyboard wielding, New Zealand Native, Tech Support Manager, Matt. Matt has been with Ausweb for a while now, and does put a fair bit of effort into meeting customers online support needs, after hours. Well it seems Matt hasn’t only been putting in overtime answering support tickets, he’s been busy preparing a new breed of Ausweb Staff!
Congratulations to Matt & Clare on their newest donation to the Ausweb support team, Caleb! Caleb was born Monday 8th of December at 5:30pm.

Matt and Caleb
All the best in the future, and hopefully we’ll see you guys soon!
News
Baby, Caleb, Clare, Matt
PhpBB updated the popular forum application on December 12th 2008 with the release of the “one year anniversary” phpBB 3.0.4 package. The delivers a huge increase in performance along with fixes for some bugs introduced with the changes in 3.0.3. It also corrects some other minor issues, and two security bugs.
If you have not done so already, phpBB strongly urges all users of its application to update to the latest release of version 3. You can find more information at the phpBB website.
http://www.phpbb.com/downloads/
PHP Applications
An teacher in Austin sent an angry, accusatory email to a local Linux collective (”HeliOS Project, which builds and provides Linux computers to disadvantaged or ‘exceptionally promising’ students”) accusing them of piracy for distributing the free operating system and excoriating them for encouraging her students to do the same. She threatened to have the group’s organizer investigated by the police, too.
Read more…
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Free Software, HeliOS, Linux, Teacher